New York Times, Monday, June 16, 2014

My first version of this puzzle had Bill Bixby and Bill Bailey in it, which Will felt was repetitious. It also had BARBARA at 9-Down, which was just plain lame. My second version had solid theme entries but had some fill issues — the third try was accepted. It sat in the queue for a few months and I noticed I could eliminate the one partial phrase and the word KLAN, which Will was happy to do. I had KLAN clued as "Sheetheads?" — that might not have cleared the editing desk. In this final version I notice that one of Will's assistants made a couple small changes in other parts of the grid, so this baby may not be perfect but it has been pretty well worked over. Any weakness at this point can be attributed to Monday constraints and 109 letters of theme fill, or 130 if you want to count BULB, BABE, BARB, BIBS, and BABAS. You might think the 23 B's in this puzzle would be close to a record — would you believe the record is 48? At one point Will told me to just give up on trying to work BTEAM in there, because the puzzle doesn't really need a theme revealer. However, I found a different place to wedge it in, and MNO was the only real downside. Hope you liked it!

Man oh man, that's a lot of B's! Perhaps appropriate for a guy named Bruce, eh? Sorry Bill Ballard, Bruce Bliven, and Barry Boone, you guys got scooped by a non-double-B. For shame, it's the BTEAM for you! There's a kid in my boys' group who we call "Big B" — I'm going to have to give him a copy of this one.

There are a lot of answers with two B's today. We keep track of various records (not that you should construct strictly to break a record or anything) like most B's in a puzzle but not "most words with two B's." I like data, but not THAT much.

A lot of strong material worked into the grid today. Look at those nice long acrosses, BIRD BRAIN and BELA BARTOK being my favorites. Even BIG BAND and BARBELL are nice bonuses. Four pairs of long across themers makes for quite a construction challenge. Then you throw in four long downs, intersecting everything? Jinkies! But wait, there's more. A couple of BULB BABAS and... where are the others? I originally highlighted the theme entries, but it became too much of a blue blur, so I just highlighted the B's. Nice touch that there aren't any extraneous B's.

For me, less could have been more for this one. Studying it, I think I would have liked just ("just," he says idiotically) the four pairs of across themers and the two pairs of downs. I stopped paying attention to the asterisks on the clues after roughly the second one. So it would have been nice if all of the themers stood on their own. And as much as I liked B TEAM as a revealer, it felt odd to me to get it so close to the start of the puzzle. I much prefer my revealers in the very middle or a bottom corner of a puzzle. Plus, it might have allowed a reduction of ABRIM, which felt like a price to pay for that extra BABE. And it felt a little inelegant that the themers weren't all symmetrical.

Given the spectacular number of constraints, it's pretty impressive that Bruce keeps the puzzle as clean as he does. I felt like there was a touch too much MNO, AMOR, MOUE, LAHR, ABRIM stuff for my ideal Monday puzzle, but that's my subjective opinion. And all of those answers had fair crossings.

Finally, I hope Will eventually uses Bruce's clue for KLAN, if it's ever necessary for a puzzle. Man oh man I got a good laugh out of that one.